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Noisy Game In Colombia: Big Danger Is the Player

Lead disks slicing the air, explosions that jolt like an electric shock. A rival's taunts.

This is not war, it's what people do for fun in Colombia, accompanied by music and a river of beer.

The game is called tejo, and it is played behind beer shacks all along the roads from Bogota to Boyaca and throughout the capital. Players throw a heavy weight, called a tejo (pronounced TAY-kho), down an outdoor court the size of a bowling alley. But instead of toppling pins, the tejo explodes pink triangles of gunpowder, shattering the tension with a bang.

The players, likewise, explode in laughter and take another swig of beer. In the background, Colombian ballads play full blast. The game is played to 9 points, or 21 points, or until the players fall on their faces. The loser buys the next round.

''It's an aggressive kind of game, especially because of the noise and because it's played with liquor,'' said Alvaro Botiva Contreras, an anthropologist who is also president of a social club outside Bogota that has a couple of tejo courts.

Tejo was not always like this. It originated as a game of the Zipa and Zaque indigenous tribes, who called it turmeque. But turmeque had about as much to do with the tejo of today as a squash ball has to do with a grenade. The Indians played with stones or pieces of wood, and the object was how far a player could throw the marker.

The Spaniards, who came here 500 years ago, substituted lead disks for the wood or stone markers, and made the game one of precision rather than distance. Nobody is quite sure when the explosions and the beer filtered into tejo, as the Colombians called it. Some suspect it was around the era known as La Violencia, a decade of unmatched bloodletting between the two traditional political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, during which more than 200,000 Colombians were killed.

Though La Violencia ended in 1958 with a formal power-sharing agreement between the parties that ran through 1974, brutality remains very much a part of daily life. There were more homicides in Colombia in the first nine months of last year, for instance, than in the entire year in the United States, which has nearly eight times the population.

Mr. Botiva, the anthropologist, noted that tejo carries an undertone of menace though it seems like a party. In that, it may well reflect the culture more closely than intended. Between the liquor and the betting, any game can end in violence, he said.

The atmosphere among the players is less tense than in a billiard hall. Opponents tease players as they prepare to throw, and mumble to themselves as they watch a badly thrown disk land far afield.

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Tejo is not just a barroom pastime. Upper-crust Colombians play, as do women. There are national tejo tournaments regulated by the Tejo Olympic Committee, during which beer and music are eschewed and the loftier values of tejo are promoted.

The official handbook is stern on the point: ''Tejo is an exercise of physically, socially and morally healthy goals, and not a pretext to unleash passions, rivalries, hatreds or physical or moral disorder. ''

Stern, but incomprehensible to the campesinos who are the true guardians of the game, who relish the alcohol, the music and the jokes as they prepare to throw.

''When I'm full of beer, nobody can beat me,'' lamented Onofre Sanchez, 58, forced to drink nonalcoholic beer because of some medication he was taking. Asked whether the alcohol disoriented him, Mr. Sanchez and the three other players on the court that day burst out laughing. ''No, senora,'' he said, and shook his head.

Nor did the loud music distract them, the players said. ''With music you start drinking, and you lose count,'' Mr. Sanchez said. It was not clear whether he meant of beers or points.

Among the players was his son, Jorge Sanchez, 24, who began playing 10 years ago. The three players who were drinking had downed more than 30 bottles of beer in a little over an hour. After nightfall, they would head for the cockfights, said Jorge Sanchez.

Though they were playing with gunpowder and throwing heavy metal objects past each other, the men said tejo was not dangerous, at least not in the way one would expect. Jose Antonio Celiz, 21, said accidents were rare.

The more likely danger was from drunken players who grew aggressive upon losing. ''It's only dangerous,'' Mr. Celiz said, ''if you don't know who you're playing with.''

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A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 1997, on Page A00009 of the National edition with the headline: Noisy Game In Colombia: Big Danger Is the Player. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe